


I read my sentence-- steadily

by middlemarch



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Love, Poetry, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 18:24:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8295595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Edith is not the only writer in the family.





	

The first year after he had gone, she pretended she had never seen the poems. She knew now what Matthew had been doing when he sat at his desk, staring out across the fields, gripping the pen, rubbing at his forehead, though he’d usually answered “Oh, nothing very pressing, just let me put this all away,” when she’d asked what had him so occupied. He’d hurriedly assembled the papers in a leather folio, tied a loose bow and shoved it in the middle drawer, then risen and always, always touched her—her bared shoulder, her cheek, the crest of her hip. When she was pregnant, he’d laid a hand on the firm rise of her belly and let the heat of his palm mark her. She’d had some curiosity about what he’d been writing, but had learned that the Matthew who came home from the War was not the same man who’d gone, that even to her, some doors would always be locked. She hadn’t thought it would take only one more death to turn the key.

Mary found the poems very beautiful, even though she saw how he was frustrated with them, the blots and strike-throughs. She would be the only reader and even she was one too many, but she couldn’t help herself after he’d left her so suddenly, with only a solemn-eyed baby and a mind emptied; what he had wanted to remove, to discard, she collected with the eagerness few would have recognized—Carson perhaps, Sybil, Matthew himself surprised by her desire, her greed. She thought she was cruelly selfish not to share them with Isobel, who had lost more than Mary, but she couldn’t bear that anyone else would see them, the words he’d labored over, the delicate images and the brutal. The verse was uneven and he struggled with meter, trochees and dactyls too jumbled for the perfection she saw he sought, but it didn’t matter to her. She stuffed herself with the lyrics, the grey mud and the gaseous, chartreuse fever of the trenches, the stars that lit a tree of barbed wire, her own eyes gazing back at her, so much more certain than she’d ever been. 

She was glad of strange things after he died. She was glad they’d never considered another name for George so she needn’t wonder whether she should have called their son Matthew or Reginald. She was glad her mother left her alone and that Tom did not, nor Granny, that her grandmother pushed her towards the only brother she had, gentle as she had never been before. She was glad she had not looked at the poems sooner so she had not had to decide whether to have any line he’d written engraved on the stone that marked him in the churchyard, that he’d been so disorderly at his desk that she had found the folio easily, the leather tie ready to be pulled loose. She was glad she read the poems, memorized them, glad to hear the words with every hoof Nyx set down, walk, trot, canter, gallop. She was glad she’d been awake during the labor with George, so she could recognize the degree of pain and remind herself it was similar to the present, even if she could not quite make out how. She sat at his desk and looked where he had, picked up his pen, and waited. Anna found her with ink on her fingers and made no comment, just went to fetch a basin of water and a cloth, and Mary saw the ink was as dark as her eyes, her hair, darker than the night without him. She saw how it might help and she thought Matthew would not mind now if she borrowed, if she began where he’d left off “Why, on Paros…”

**Author's Note:**

> I thought, what if Matthew wrote poetry? About the War and all his other traumatic experiences? And Mary could find the poems after he died. The beginning of the poem Mary finishes Matthew has taken from Callimachus, Callimachus (305–240 BC) was a native of the Greek colony of Cyrene, Libya. He was a noted poet, critic and scholar at the Library of Alexandria and enjoyed the patronage of the Egyptian–Greek Pharaohs Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Ptolemy III Euergetes.
> 
> I have taken the title from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
